The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

15

As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of my own self as possible. I have tried not to allude (though a hint now and then might have made the background of my research somewhat clearer) to the circumstances of my life. So at this point of my story I shall not dwell upon certain business difficulties I experienced on my arrival in Paris, where I had a more or less permanent home; they were in no way related to my quest, and if I mention them in passing, it is only to stress the fact that I was so engrossed in the attempt to discover Sebastian's last love that I cheerfully dismissed any personal troubles which my taking such a long holiday might entail.

I was not sorry that I had started off with the Berlin clue. It had at least led me to obtain an unexpected glimpse of another chapter of Sebastian's past. And now one name was erased, and I had three more chances before me. The Paris telephone directory yielded the information that 'Graun (von), Helene' and 'Rechnoy, Paul' (the 'de', I noticed, was absent) corresponded to the addresses I possessed. The prospect of meeting a husband was unpleasant but unavoidable. The third lady, Lydia Bohemsky, was ignored by both directories, that is the telephone book and that other Bottin masterpiece, where addresses are arranged according to streets. Anyway, the address I had might help me to get at her. I knew my Paris well, so that I saw at once the most time-saving sequence in which to dispose my calls if I wanted to have done with them in one day. Let it be added, in case the reader be surprised at the rough-and-ready style of my activity, that I dislike telephoning as much as I do writing letters.

The door at which I rang was opened by a lean, tall, shock-headed man in his shirtsleeves and with a brass stud at his collarless throat. He held a chessman – a black knight – in his hand. I greeted him in Russian.

'Come in, come in,' he said cheerfully, as if he had been expecting me.

'My name is so-and-so,' I said.

'And mine,' he cried, 'is Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy' – and he guffawed heartily as if it were a good joke. 'If you please,' he said, pointing with the chessman to an open door.

I was ushered into a modest room with a sewing machine standing in one corner and a faint smell of ribbon-and-linen in the air. A heavily built man was sitting sideways at a table on which an oilcloth chessboard was spread, with pieces too large for the squares. He looked at them askance while the empty cigarette holder in the corner of his mouth looked the other way. A pretty little boy of four or five was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by tiny motor cars. Pahl Pahlich chucked the black knight on to the table and its head came off. Black carefully screwed it on again.

'Sit down,' said Pahl Pahlich. 'This is my cousin,' he added. Black bowed. I sat down on the third (and last) chair. The child came up to me and silently showed me a new red-and-blue pencil.

'I could take your rook now if I wished,' said Black darkly, 'but I have a much better move.'

He lifted his queen and delicately crammed it into a cluster of yellowish pawns – one of which was represented by a thimble.

Pahl Pahlich made a lightning swoop and took the queen with his bishop. Then he roared with laughter.

'And now,' said Black calmly, when White had stopped roaring, 'now you are in the soup. Check, my dove.'

While they were arguing over the position, with White trying to take his move back, I looked round the room. I noted the portrait of what had been in the past an Imperial Family. And the moustache of a famous general, moscowed a few years ago. I noted, too, the bulging springs of the bug-brown couch, which served, I felt, as a triple bed – for husband and wife and child. For a minute, the object of my coming seemed to be madly absurd. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls. The little boy was drawing a motor car for me.

'I am at your service,' said Pahl Pahlich (he had lost, I saw, and Black was putting the pieces back into an old card-board box – all except the thimble). I said what I had carefully prepared beforehand: namely that I wanted to see his wife, because she had been friends with some… well, German friends of mine. (I was afraid of mentioning Sebastian's name too soon.)

'You'll have to wait a bit then,' said Pahl Pahlich. 'She is busy in town, you see. I think, she'll be back in a moment.'

I made up my mind to wait, although I felt that today I should hardly manage to see his wife alone. I hoped however that a little deft questioning might at once settle whether she had known Sebastian; then, by and by, I could make her talk.

'In the meantime,' said Pahl Pahlich, 'we shall clap down a little brandy – cognachkoo.'

The child, finding that I had been sufficiently interested in his pictures, wandered off to his uncle, who at once took him on his knee and proceeded to draw with incredible rapidity and very beautifully a racing car.

'You are an artist,' I said – to say something.

Pahl Pahlich, who was rinsing glasses in the tiny kitchen, laughed and shouted over his shoulder: 'Oh, he's an all-round genius. He can play the violin standing upon his head, and he can multiply one telephone number by another in three seconds, and he can write his name upside down in his ordinary hand.'

'And he can drive a taxi,' said the child, dangling its thin, dirty little legs.

'No, I shan't drink with you,' said Uncle Black, as Pahl Pahlich put the glasses on the table. 'I think I shall take the boy out for a walk. Where are his things?'

The boy's coat was found, and Black led him away. Pahl Pahlich poured out the brandy and said: 'You must excuse me for these glasses. I was rich in Russia and I got rich again in Belgium ten years ago, but then I went broke. Here's to yours.'

'Does your wife sew?' I asked, so as to set the ball rolling.

'Oh, yes, she has taken up dressmaking,' he said with a happy laugh. 'And I'm a type-setter, but I have just lost my job. She's sure to be back in a moment. I did not know she had German friends,' he added.

'I think,' I said, 'they met her in Germany, or was it Alsace?' He had been refilling his glass eagerly, but suddenly he stopped and looked at me agape.

'I'm afraid, there's some mistake,' he exclaimed. 'It must have been my first wife. Varvara Mitrofanna has never been out of Paris – except Russia, of course – she came here from Sebastopol via Marseilles.' He drained his glass and began to laugh.

'That's a good one,' he said eyeing me curiously. 'Have I met you before? Do you know my first one personally?'

I shook my head.

'Then you're lucky,' he cried. 'Damned lucky. And your German friends have sent you upon a wild goose chase because you'll never find her.'

'Why?' I asked getting more and more interested.

'Because soon after we separated, and that was years ago, I lost sight of her absolutely. Somebody saw her in Rome, and somebody saw her in Sweden – but I'm not sure even of that. She may be here, and she may be in hell. I don't care.'

'And you could not suggest any way of finding her?'

'None,' he said.

'Mutual acquaintances?'

They were her acquaintances, not mine,' he answered with a shudder.

'You haven't got a photo of her or something?'

'Look here,' he said, 'what are you driving at? Are the police after her? Because, you know, I shouldn't be surprised if she turned out to be an international spy. Mata Hari! That's her type. Oh, absolutely. And then…. Well, she's not a girl you can easily forget once she's got into your system. She sucked me dry, and in more ways than one. Money and soul, for instance. I would have killed her… if it had not been for Anatole.'

'And who's that?' I asked.

'Anatole? Oh, that's the executioner. The man with the guillotine here. So you're not of the police, after all. No? Well it's your own business, I suppose. But, really, she drove me mad. I met her, you know, in Ostende, that must have been, let me see, in 1927 – she was twenty then, no, not even twenty. I knew she was another fellow's mistress and all that, but I did not care. Her idea of life was drinking cocktails, and eating a large supper at four o'clock in the morning, and dancing the shimmy or whatever it was called, and inspecting brothels because that was fashionable among Parisian snobs, and buying expensive clothes, and raising hell in hotels when she thought the maid had stolen her small change which she afterwards found in the bathroom…. Oh, and all the rest of it – you may find her in any cheap novel, she's a type, a type. And she loved inventing some rare illness and going to some famous kurort, and…'

'Wait a bit,' I said. 'That interests me. In June 1929, she was alone in Blauberg:

'Exactly, but that was at the very end of our marriage. We were living in Paris then, and soon after we separated, and I worked for a year at a factory in Lyon. I was broke, you see.'

'Do you mean to say she met some man in Blauberg?'

'No, that I don't know. You see, I don't think she really went very far in deceiving me, not really, you know, not the whole hog – at least I tried to think so, because there were always lots of men around her, and she didn't mind being kissed by them, I suppose, but I should have gone mad, had I let myself brood over the matter. Once, I remember…'

'Pardon me,' I interrupted again, 'but are you quite sure you never heard of an English friend of hers?'

'English? I thought you said German. No, I don't know. There was a young American at Ste Maxime in 1928, I believe, who almost swooned every time Ninka danced with him – and, well, there may have been Englishmen at Ostende and elsewhere, but really I never bothered about the nationality of her admirers.'

'So you are quite, quite sure that you don't know about Blauberg and… well, about what happened afterwards?'

'No,' he said. 'I don't think that she was interested in anybody there. You see, she had one of her illness-phases at the time – and she used to eat only lemon-ice and cucumbers, and talk of death and the Nirvana or something – she had a weakness for Lhassa – you know what I mean…'

'What exactly was her name?' I asked.

'Well, when I met her her name was Nina Toorovetz – but whether – No, I think, you won't find her. As a matter of fact, I often catch myself thinking that she has never existed. I told Varvara Mitrofanna about her, and she said it was merely a bad dream after seeing a bad cinema film. Oh, you are not going yet, are you? She'll be back in a minute….' He looked at me and laughed (I think he had had a little too much of that brandy).

'Oh, I forget,' he said. 'It is not my present wife that you want to find. And by the way,' he added, 'my papers are in perfect order. I can show you my carte de travail. And if you do find her, I should like to see her before she goes to prison. Or perhaps better not.'

'Well, thank you for our conversation,' I said, as we were, rather too enthusiastically, shaking hands – first in the room, then in the passage, then in the doorway.

'I thank you,' Pahl Pahlich cried. 'You see, I quite like talking about her and I am sorry I did not keep any of her photographs.'

I stood for a moment reflecting. Had I pumped him enough…. Well, I could always see him once more…. Might there not be a chance photo in one of those illustrated papers with cars, furs, dogs, Riviera fashions? I asked about that.

'Perhaps,' he answered, 'perhaps. She got a prize once at a fancy-dress ball, but I don't quite remember where it happened. All towns seemed restaurants and dancing halls to me.

He shook his head laughing boisterously, and slammed the door. Uncle Black and the child were slowly coming up the stairs as I went down.

'Once upon a time,' Uncle Black was saying, 'there was a racing motorist who had a little squirrel; and one day…'